To be honest, I haven't gotten up to very much movie watching since arriving in Taiwan, and the release of the new Sight and Sound poll yesterday came as a bit of a surprise to me. Still, as someone who has seen many of the movies on the list, it was interesting to peruse.
The first thing that struck me was Jeanne Dielman at the top. Very surprising, considering Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Tokyo Story have dominated the very top slots for the past several iterations, and also because Jeanne Dielman was at #35 in 2012. While I was almost tempted to dismiss this year's #1 selection as Sight and Sound trying too hard to put a female director at the top, Jeanne Dielmann is in my personal top 10 films of all time, so I have no complaints. Moving down, I like the In the Mood for Love aesthetic as much as the next guy, and while I consider the final scene of Beau Travail to be possibly the greatest in all of movies, I think #5 and #7 are a bit of a stretch. I would have kept them around #23 and #78, as they were in the last poll. Stoked to see Mulholland Drive at #8, though. May it continue to rise into the top 5!
I can't judge all of the new entrants because I haven't seen them all. Most are directed by women or black people, and/or from the 2010s. I don't think Cleo from 5 to 7 belongs on the list. Do the Right Thing is a surefire classic, but I don't know if I would have put it as high as #24. The presence of Ghibli movies is nice to see. Meshes of the Afternoon, Daisies, Moonlight, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Parasite, and Tropical Malady are outstanding additions. Same for older staples like The Apartment (more Billy Wilder is always good), Chungking Express, and The Shining (my favorite Kubrick movie). I wouldn't have added Portrait of a Lady on Fire (especially at #30, for goodness sakes!), Black Girl, or Get Out (I think it's one of the most overrated movies of recent years).
Westerns as a genre seem to have done pretty badly. The Searchers saw a tumble from the top 10, Once Upon a Time in the West is barely hanging onto its spot on the list, and The Wild Bunch and Rio Bravo dropped out altogether. Rio Bravo is the only one of the four that I would have considered for a Top 100 list.
It wasn't a great poll for Bergman, or for Welles. I think Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal are considerably overrated, so I'm not too sad to see them go. Persona deservedly hangs onto its top 20 spot. As for Welles, I probably would have kept one or both of The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil in the top 100, just on the basis of their technical prowess. Renoir, Fellini, Antonioni, Dreyer, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and JLG (rest in peace) seem to have taken a hit as well. With potentially the exception of Tarkovsky, I have no qualms.
Chinatown is one of the great American movies, and it's probably gone because in 2022 it's not acceptable to vote for a Roman Polanski movie. It's disappointing that The Godfather Part II is no longer there (it was highest-ranked movie in 2012 to fall from the 2022 list). I would have put it in the top 20, or even the top 10. Overrated European classics like L'Avventura, Journey to Italy, Ordet, The Leopard, Breathless, and 8 1/2 took well-deserved tumbles of -51, -31, -24, -33, -25, and -21, respectively. Same for Battleship Potemkin, which nosedived from #11 to #54.
On the other hand, I'm happy to see Close-Up, Playtime, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul all rise by double-digit slots. It's slightly disappointing that Edward Yang's masterpieces A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi didn't rise with them. I think they both belong in the top 20, at least. I also woudn't have complained if Tropical Malady had found its way a bit higher, to say, the top 50. But I'm thankful that Sansho Dayu remains on the list, even if it's fallen a little bit since last time. The Japanese masters deserve their representation, and it seems to have survived intact.
Overall, I think it's a very strong list. The beloved classics remain, along with a number of fresh new faces (many of which I want to get down to watching myself!). The crusty European canon ate some humble pie, and some newer classics (in relative terms, at least) took well-deserved spots higher up on the list. The new Rolling Stone album poll went way too far trying to add more representation and recent entries, to the point where it can't even be taken seriously. This new Sight and Sound poll strikes a good balance between respecting the old masters and also beginning to shift the conversation, in a very good way, about who we include in the discussion of cinema's "greats".